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Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread – By praying this one petition on behalf of the entire human race, we are placing our trust in God’s providence. We pray that all of the starving people will obtain food, we pray that all atheists will come to know and love the Lord, we pray that the unemployed will find jobs and we pray that everyone will receive and accept the grace they need to get to Heaven. By concentrating on “this day” (and not tomorrow), we put our faith in God’s providence and follow Jesus’ command to avoid worrying about tomorrow (Matthew 6:34).
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Give us this day our daily bread does not only mean food. It is about the Eucharist.
http://www.adoremus.org/0707SupersubstantialBread.html
Our “Daily Bread?”
But is the Holy Eucharist of the Eucharistic banquet also the daily bread of the “Our Father”? If the “Our Father” is the perfect prayer, which is most perfectly prayed in the context of the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass, then does it not make sense that the daily bread that we most need and so ask for is the supersubstantial bread of the Holy Eucharist?
It may surprise many Catholics to learn that this indeed is the teaching of the Catholic Church as expressed by the Council of Trent and as re-proposed in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. Furthermore, many Protestants who say this prayer daily may be shocked to learn that they are truly praying to receive Holy Communion daily and that this interpretation goes back to very words of Our Lord in the “Our Father”: “Give us this day our daily bread”.
The Greek word here is epiousion, which is a hapax — a word that is only used here and nowhere else in the Greek language — and so presumed to be the Greek equivalent of whatever word Our Lord may have used in Aramaic or Hebrew. Most translate the word as “daily”, and this goes back to the Latin of Saint Jerome, who renders “arton epiousion” as “panis quotidianum”, daily bread, in the Gospel of Luke. However, in the Gospel of Saint Matthew, Jerome translates the same words as “panis supersubstantialem”. In other words, Jerome, who realized that this Greek hapax could not be expressed in Latin with both meanings at once, chose to give it one meaning in Matthew — “daily”; and another in Luke — “supersubstantial”, so as to preserve both senses of the word for Latin speaking Christians, albeit in two distinct biblical locations.
We have mostly lost this second original meaning — supersubstantial — and so are usually unaware of this lost Eucharistic connotation in our recitation of the Our Father.
Thanks for the information and the adoremus link.
So would superstantial mean
above all other substances?
I have often pondered the meaning of the phrase “give us this day, our daily bread” in the Lord’s Prayer. What is this bread that we ask to be given to us daily? The answer came to me several years ago when I was preparing to be the lector on the 18th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B.
The first reading is from Exodus 16. In verse 4, the LORD said to Moses, “I will now rain down bread from heaven for you. Each day the people are to go out and gather their daily portion.” In verse 16, Moses tells the Isrealites, “This is the bread which the LORD has given you to eat.”
The Gospel reading ends with the following from John 6:30-35. So they (the crowd) said to him, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you? What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written: ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’” So Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” So they said to him, “Sir, give us this bread always.” Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.
Further on in John:6, Jesus refers to himself several more times as bread. In verse 51 he says: “I myself am the living bread come down from heaven. If anyone eats this bread he shall live forever; the bread I will give is my flesh, for the life of the world.” To this the Jews said, “How can this man give us (his) flesh to eat?”
Jesus gives His answer at the Last Supper. From Matthew 26:26 - While they were eating, Jesus took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and giving it to his disciples said, “Take this and eat it; this is my body.”
So this daily bread that Jesus taught us to ask for from the Father is His body in the Holy Eucharist.